Watchdog says electroshock must be banned, but until this occurs, hospitals are being notified that omitting patient information of how electroshock treatment causes brain-damage and memory loss may constitute consumer fraud.
Until ECT is banned, CCHR intends to investigate and monitor precisely what information is provided to potential ECT patients and their families by electroshock-hospitals, so that such information may be available to regulatory entities and legal counsel for the those harmed by this practice.
CCHR is writing to the more than 400 psychiatric facilities in the U.S. delivering ECT alerting them to the recognized risks that patients must be informed of to protect them and to avoid consumer fraud action being taken against the hospital and psychiatrists administering ECT. As part of a worldwide movement that wants electroshock permanently banned, until this occurs, every known risk of the damaging practice must be disclosed along with all safer, non-physically invasive alternatives that are available.
CCHR’s review of hospital websites offering ECT and electroshock informed consent forms, shows grossly inadequate information, which is misleading to patients. At a time when mental health is so prevalent in the news, better information must be disclosed until this brain-damaging procedure is banned.
Example: Approximately 150,000 people get ECT every year in the US, with 2,000 shock treatments being done every year by Washington University in St. Louis psychiatrists at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, who still claim that this abusive treatment is safe and effective in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary. When psychiatrists say ECT is “effective”, they mean the patient feels less depressed; of course, the patient doesn’t feel much of anything anymore, good or bad. In fact, what ECT really does is similar to smacking your thumb with a hammer, making it seem that no other problem is important. (Of course, they give you a general anesthetic to suppress the pain. The body still feels it; shocking, isn’t it?)
So why do they still perform ECT? Because they charge up to $2500 per session; and if you are on Medicare you are a prime candidate for this barbaric “treatment.”
The bottom line is that electroshock should be banned and because, arguably, its use constitutes assault and battery — certainly from a patient’s perspective. It does not belong in any mental health system.
The child mental health industry is a system that puts profit above children’s lives, preying on unsuspecting parents and taking advantage of disadvantaged children, such as those covered under Medicaid (state and federal health coverage for lower income families and those with disabilities). It is rife with abuse, yet this hugely profitable industry is rarely held to account for its rampant abuse of our most vulnerable—children.
It is an industry which milks the foster care system for huge profit, where children are four times more likely to be given mind-altering psychotropic drugs than non-foster care children, and much more likely to be prescribed cocktails of these drugs.
It is an industry that electroshocks children including babies, using state funds for lower income families (Medicaid).
It is a business masquerading as healthcare which sells parents and legislators on the idea of helping troubled children. Yet this help is more often simply incarcerating children in behavioral schools or psychiatric wards, where treatment consists of psychiatric drug cocktails, degradation, solitary confinement, and brutal restraint procedures which have killed children. And all of this is done under the guise of helping children.
The abuse is not limited to one chain of psychiatric facilities or one mode of psychiatric behavioral “treatment.” This abuse in the child mental health industry is systemic—yet unknown to most of the public.
For example: Information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveals that 19 states are currently administering electroshock to children, with 7 of those states electroshocking children aged 0-5 years old. These are all children being electroshocked while psychiatrists and facilities bill Medicaid for their “treatment.”
Yet another example — Only one month after the world witnessed the tragic death of George Floyd, unable to breathe as he was physically restrained and held to the ground, 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick, an African American, was physically restrained at Sequel Youth & Family Services’ facility in Michigan, and also cried out, “I can’t breathe!” before passing out. Thirty hours later, on May 1, 2020, he was dead. Cornelius had gone into cardiac arrest while being restrained by Lakeside Academy staff, a residential psychiatric facility that treated foster care and other kids with behavioral issues. A witness to Cornelius’s restraint said, “[T]his kid threw a sandwich. He was being unruly and they couldn’t control him. So, four guys…the size of rugby players tackled him.”
Cornelius is not alone; countless children have suffocated and died after being subjected to deadly restraints within these psychiatric facilities and behavioral treatment centers.
This is not healthcare. This is child abuse. And it is just the tip of the iceberg.
Please help us to support the cause and end the abuse of children in the psychiatric industry. We are making incredible progress, as many of the psychiatric facilities abusing these children are now under investigation. And many state legislators want to put an end to this abuse. There is more to be done, and so we ask you to continue to support our Fight For Kids campaign. Please support the cause and also watch our latest video here.
In March of 2020 the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) banned the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Massachusetts from using electric shock devices on their autistic and other mentally troubled children. In July of 2021 a federal appeals court removed the ban. The school is once again electro shocking about 60 students a day.
The school administers electric skin shocks in a form of “aversion therapy” for aggressive or self-injurious behavior. School staff trigger a shock to a child by using a remote control that zaps children with electric current when they misbehave. The school calls this a “medical device.” Since 1987 a state court must determine that such forced treatment is appropriate.
This electrical stimulation device delivers a powerful and painful electric shock to the wearer’s skin in an effort to punish. This school is the only facility in the country that uses coercive electric shock therapy to “treat” individuals who severely self-injure or are aggressive.
The FDA finally recognized in March 2020 (after 20 years) that these devices “present substantial psychological and physical risks and, in fact, can worsen underlying symptoms—while leading to heightened anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Unfortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned the FDA ban on July 6, 2021, stating that the ban was a regulation of the practice of medicine, which is outside the FDA’s area of authority.
The History of Abuse
In April 2016, the FDA first proposed banning electrical stimulation devices for self-injurious or aggressive behavior.
In 2018, the media reported that the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center would be allowed to continue administering electric shocks to its special needs students after a judge ruled the procedure conformed to the “accepted standard of care,” in spite of the practice being condemned by disability rights groups and the ACLU.
On December 3, 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of The Organization of American States published a Precautionary Measure calling for the school to immediately cease electroshocking special needs children as a disciplinary measure.
In March 2020 the FDA finally determined that the devices presented a substantial and unreasonable risk to self-injurious and aggressive patients, justifying banning the devices for that purpose.
The Appeals Court
The appeals court examined the question, “Does the FDA have legal authority to ban an otherwise legal device from a particular use?”
The court concluded that current law prohibits the FDA from regulating the practice of medicine, and therefore it vacated the FDA’s rule banning electrical stimulation devices for self-injurious and aggressive behavior. There was one dissenting opinion; the Chief Judge found in favor of the FDA. [Read the full court opinion here.]
Of course, the lie in the argument is that electro shocking children is “practicing medicine.” In fact it is torture, not medicine.
The Case Against Torture
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment has remarked that Electro Convulsive Treatment (ECT) amounts to torture. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also stated that there are no indications for the use of ECT on minors. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) calls for a ban on “forced treatment.”
Granted that ECT is more severe than electric skin shocks, just have someone force you to stick your finger into an electric wall socket and tell us that this is not torture.
In the United Nations July 24, 2018 Annual Report of the High Commissioner “Mental health and human rights,” it states, “States should ensure that all health care and services, including all mental health care and services, are based on the free and informed consent of the individual concerned, and that legal provisions and policies permitting the use of coercion and forced interventions, including involuntary hospitalization and institutionalization, the use of restraints, psychosurgery, forced medication, and other forced measures aimed at correcting or fixing an actual or perceived impairment, including those allowing for consent or authorization by a third party, are repealed. States should reframe and recognize these practices as constituting torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and as amounting to discrimination against users of mental health services, persons with mental health conditions and persons with psychosocial disabilities.”
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, formally adopted on December 10, 1948 states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
CCHR’s own Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1969, states these rights, among others: “The right to refuse any treatment the patient considers harmful.” “No person shall be given psychiatric or psychological treatment against his or her will.”
We found a number of useful definitions for the phrase “common sense.”
– Sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts. – An ability to reach intelligent conclusions. – A reliable ability to judge and decide with soundness, prudence, and intelligence. – The ability to think and behave in a reasonable way and to make good decisions. – Good sense and sound judgment in practical matters. – Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge. – The basic level of practical knowledge and judgment that we all need to help us live in a reasonable and safe way. – Agreement with those perceptions, associations and judgments possessed of the generality of mankind. With respect to this definition, some have said that common sense implies something everyone knows; if that is the case, then what appears to be common sense is often common nonsense, given the level of disagreements showing up on current social media.
In Latin, sensus communis means “common feelings of humanity.”
Sometimes the phrase is found hyphenated: “common-sense” — something which reflects common sense, as in “a common-sense approach.”
Discussion
We wondered if it is possible to teach common sense, or if it is an innate (although not always evident) characteristic of humanity.
If anyone can have an instance or episode of common sense, perhaps we should also examine how this ability can be compromised.
In the past, some religious scholars have posited the negative influence of Satan as the mechanism of compromise. Others have attributed common sense, or lack of it, to one’s maturity level.
One place where common sense fails is in superstition. We have discussed superstition previously; it might be helpful to review it here.
We see many scholarly articles whose premise is that psychology and psychiatry are “scientific” and thus not matters of common sense. We tried reading a paper about psychiatry and common sense; frankly, making any sense of it without falling asleep was a challenge. It propagates the idea that “common sense rests on judgments of the probable rather than what we can directly ascertain as true” — which we think, from the definitions above, is directly contrary to the idea that common sense depends on the perception and observation of reality. Perhaps, though, that is precisely where common sense leaves off and superstition begins.
The True Basis For Common Sense
So we come to what we think is the true basis for common sense, which is “obnosis” — the observation of the obvious, on which all good judgment is based.
Observation is not passive, it is very much an active process, involving the closest possible study of what one is observing. Thus we see that the most important thing which hinders or gets in the way of one’s common sense is anything which blocks or hinders close observation. Truth or falsity, while relevant, is not even close in importance to the actual observation of what is there in front of you.
And yes, you can indeed teach someone to observe. You can also rehabilitate this ability in someone whose common sense has been compromised by a too heavy dependence on belief as a replacement for certainty.
One other thing that aids in the exercise of common sense would be the ability to imagine the consequences of one’s actions. This provides a predictive quality so important to good judgment.
How Does Psychiatry Compromise Common Sense?
Having an unobstructed view of the world, as we have just observed, is of paramount importance. This viewpoint, as far as the physical perceptions provided by one’s body goes, depends upon the proper functioning of one’s nerves and the nervous system. Yet the primary “treatments” of psychiatry are drug-based, with neuroleptic (“nerve-seizing”) drugs a chief offender. And lately there is a heavy psychiatric emphasis on psychedelic drugs, known primarily for their interference with such perceptions.
Need we even mention the harm that psychiatric Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) does — a direct attack on the brain, the center of the body’s nerve system.
Can you imagine how these might compromise one’s common sense? There are harmful consequences for psychiatric treatment.
The Bottom Line
A Truly Common Sense Approach would be banning ECT, banning psychiatric drugs, in fact defunding and banning psychiatry.
Contact your local, state, and federal officials and representatives and let them know what you think about this.
As an English word, “attention” can mean one of many definitions:
applying the mind to something
selective focusing one’s perception or awareness
consideration with a view to action
an act of civility or courtesy
sympathetic consideration of someone’s needs and wants
a position assumed by a soldier
considering or taking notice
dealing with or taking special care
focusing interest
[From Latin attendere, from ad- ‘to’ + tendere ‘stretch’.]
Attention is a built-in attribute of living beings. For people (and some animals), it’s generally the ability to self-determinedly focus awareness (to greater or lesser degree); for plants, one might observe a more physical characteristic such as motion toward a light source.
There are two extremes of attention. Introversion is looking inward. Extroversion is looking outward. Attention can be aberrated such that it becomes too fixed and unable to sweep, or too dispersed and unable to focus. Somewhere in between these extremes is an optimum level for a given situation.
A simple remedy for excessive introversion is extroversion — a good look at and communication with the wider external environment; Take A Walk and Look At Things! A simple remedy for excessive extroversion, which is sometimes called “being buttered all over the universe”, could be “mindfulness” — which is just being in Present Time.
Attention is actually a flow of energy; it can flow outward, inward, or appear relatively motionless. As long as you can keep someone’s attention fixated or confused they can be controlled; this is how hypnotism works.
In the current environment of society, especially in psychiatric mental health “care”, it is all too common for attention to be manipulated by drugs, shock or impact. Picture being slapped in the face: got your attention, did it? Unfortunately such an impact can have two entirely opposite outcomes. On the one hand it might cause one to focus fixedly on the source of the impact. On the other hand it might cause one to lose consciousness and be unable to focus attention at all. Which way it goes depends on the suddenness and strength of the force. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), or shock treatment, is an extreme but prevalent example of psychiatric brutality.
Another often unsuspected cause of attention issues is illiteracy or study problems. The many side effects of reading and comprehension difficulties are a main barrier to one’s ability to focus attention. For example, the July 2002 George W. Bush President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education revealed the source of a deeply troubled Special Education system: 40 percent of kids are being labeled with “learning disorders” simply because they have not been taught to read.
ADHD actually represents the spontaneous behaviors of normal children. When these behaviors become age-inappropriate, excessive or disruptive, the potential causes are limitless, including: boredom, poor teaching, inconsistent discipline at home, reading difficulty, tiredness, street drugs, nutritional deficiency, toxic overload, and many kinds of underlying physical illness.
The main “treatments” for so-called ADHD are psychotropic drugs which have known side effects of violence and suicide. Some of these drugs are no more than amphetamine-like stimulants, designed to shock one into focusing attention. Aside from the physical impact, there are also severe emotional conditions caused by even short-term use of such drugs. Hallucinations and psychotic behavior are not uncommon.
Due to the hazards of these drugs, in order to receive federal funds under the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act), the “Prohibition on Mandatory Medication Amendment” (H.R.1350) was signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 3, 2004 and requires schools to implement policies that prohibit schoolchildren being forced onto psychiatric drugs as a requisite for their education. The law states, “The psychological/psychiatric system should not be able to abuse Special Education by diagnosing childhood and educational problems and failure as ‘mental disorders.'”
Recommendations
People do not have a deficiency of attention, nor do they have a deficiency of attention drugs. They may have barriers that prevent or inhibit effective use of attention, but these have non-psychiatric-drug solutions.
1. Support legislative measures that will protect children from psychiatric and psychological interference and which will remove their destructive influence from our schools.
2. Ultimately, psychiatry and psychology must be eliminated from all education systems and their coercive and unworkable methods should never be funded by the State.
3. No person should be given psychiatric or psychological treatment against their will.
4. Government funding should never be used for mental health screening or treatment programs and should be allocated, instead, to better educational facilities, teachers and tutoring to improve the literacy and educational standards of students.
Sustainable: Of, relating to, or being a method or lifestyle for using resources so that the resources can be maintained and continued, and are not depleted or permanently damaged.
[from Old French sustenir (French: soutenir), from Latin sustineo, sustinere, from sub– (under) + teneo (hold, uphold, possess, guard, maintain)]
The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals
The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and their 169 associated targets adopted in 2015 and accepted by all Member States seek to realize the human rights of all and balance economic, social and environmental factors towards peace and prosperity for all.
To this end we examine some of the existing factors which block or inhibit the realization of these goals, and which must be eliminated so that the goals can be achieved in practice.
SDG 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.
Target 17.16: Enhance the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in all countries, in particular developing countries.
How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 17.16
It should be obvious by now that psychiatry is not a sustainable industry, neither by definition nor by example.
The main resource in consideration here is people, the most critical building blocks of society. Yet psychiatry has no cures, and depends on damaging their patients to continue in business.
“Green Mental Health Care is based on the preservation and treatment of the mind and body (for they are not separate functions) using non-toxic, non-addictive, and non-invasive strategies that produces good mental health. Green Mental Health Care has not only proven to be superior in patient outcomes than any other treatment method, including the use of psychiatric drugs, but it achieves the patient’s health goals at a fraction of the cost while saving them from the life-threatening health risks associated with psychiatric drugs.“
Unsustainable Psychiatric Practices
“Unsustainable prescription drug costs will ultimately create pressures on health systems and insurers to reduce spending in other areas or to decrease benefits.“
ElectroConvulsive Therapy (ECT), or shock therapy, is a highly lucrative but damaging psychiatric practice. The purpose of shock treatment is to create brain damage. This brain damage is what brings about the memory loss and learning disability, as well as the spatial and temporal disorientation which always follows shock treatments. All physical damage done to the brain by ECT is permanent and irreversible. There is evidence that the damage, once begun by ECT, is progressive and feeds on itself, leading to further brain deterioration, including physical shrinkage of the brain and a shortening of the life of the victim. This barbaric “treatment” is currently being pushed on an unsuspecting and vulnerable patient population for major depression, but in reality it creates a patient for life due to this brain damage. Sign the petition to Ban ECT.
With mental health treatment costing up to 300% more than general medical treatment, spiraling costs are unavoidable when mental health care is mandated.
Psychiatrists and psychologists proclaim a worldwide epidemic of mental health problems and urge massive funding increases as the only solution. Yet Community Mental Health programs have been an expensive and colossal failure, creating homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment all over the world.
Whenever a “mental patient” commits an act of senseless violence, psychiatrists invariably blame the tragedy on the person’s failure to continue their medication. Such incidents are used to justify mandated community treatment and involuntary commitment laws. However, statistics and facts show it is psychiatric drugs themselves that can create the very violence or mental incompetence they are prescribed to treat.
The end result of psychiatric treatment is not a cured patient, returned to society as a well-adjusted, functioning contributor, but rather a person with the same or worse mental symptoms, told they must remain on debilitating psychiatric drugs for life, because psychiatrists know of no other cure.
“Biomedical psychiatry” has yet to validate a single psychiatric diagnosis as a disease, or as anything neurological, biological, chemically imbalanced or genetic. Decades of psychiatric monopoly over mental health has only lead to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics and continuously escalating funding demands — the very definition of unsustainable.
The claim that only increased funding will cure the problems of psychiatry has lost its ring of truth. Psychiatry and psychology should be held accountable for the funds already given them, and irrefutably and scientifically prove the physical existence of mental disorders they claim should be treated and covered by insurance in the same way as physical diseases are.
The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options.
Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 17 can occur.
“People need proper and effective healthcare, not damaging drugs and electroshock that passes for mental health treatment today. Funds should be redirected from psychiatry into safe, accountable non-psychiatric medical care and social programs. This is especially true for the African American community, given psychiatry’s long history of racist eugenics theories which still permeate modern day mental health care.“
—Reverend Fred Shaw
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is the leading mental health industry watchdog in the world, responsible for helping to enact more than 180 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abusive mental health practices.
In 2020, CCHR International spokesperson Reverend Fred Shaw, started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, educators and doctors. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protesters as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.
This type of rampant abuse of African Americans within the mental health industry continues to this day. Shaw has now launched a Task Force to combat institutional racism and empower the African American and minority communities with facts about modern eugenics masked today as “mental health care.” The Task Force comprises African American leaders, including ministers, attorneys, doctors, psychologists and civil rights advocates.
For generations eugenics—the fraudulent, dehumanizing and harmful psychological theory that certain races of color were not equal to whites and, therefore, “deserved” fewer rights—has been used in the mental health system and in other social policies to justify horrific oppression of African Americans and minorities.
In 1993 a team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland triggered seizures in patients with a magnetic field. They thought this was wonderful, and could lead to a revolution in treatment of various ailments.
Yet competent medical experts warn that seizures are linked to developmental disabilities, learning and behavioral disorders, and many other negative long-term outcomes. The Mayo Clinic advises people to seek immediate medical help if one has a seizure.
Psychiatrists, however, are banking on making a ton of money by forcing vulnerable people to have seizures for depression.
Magnetic Seizure Therapy (MST) is a brain stimulation therapy in which magnetic pulses deliberately induce seizures, similar to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), in patients under general anesthesia.
Like Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS), MST uses magnetic pulses instead of electricity to restimulate a precise target in the brain. However, unlike rTMS, MST aims to induce a seizure like ECT does, in the forlorn hope that this would not have all the horrific side effects of ECT.
The claim is that this assault on the brain reduces symptoms from major depression or bipolar disorder in 30-40% of individuals so treated. Well, of course it might temporarily reduce symptoms, since it basically shuts down normal activity of the brain for a period.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t cure anything and never will, while also carrying the significant risks of anesthesia exposure and induction of seizures.
Even the psychiatric billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), carries a category for seizures [“Conversion disorder (functional neurological symptom disorder), With attacks or seizures”], for which psychiatrists can prescribe one or more psychotropic drugs. [A Conversion Disorder is a mental condition in which a person has some neurologic symptoms unrelated to a specific disease.]
All competent medical personnel know about the grave consequences of untreated seizures, yet psychiatrists actually promote this as a “treatment.” How do they get away with this?
Seizures are also one of the possible adverse side effects of various psychiatric drugs such as psychostimulants, antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety drugs, and lithium. What’s one more so-called “treatment” that causes seizures?
The psychiatric industry has a history of deliberately reducing their patient’s intelligence as a “treatment.” Evidence that electroshock lowers IQ is certainly available. Documented side effects of ECT include lowered intellectual function, with a 20- to 40-point drop in IQ.
Are you beginning to see the pattern here? Since psychiatry cannot cure any mental disorder, they turn to “treatments” which just knock you out so you don’t feel bad any more. Of course, you don’t feel good, either.
Sure, fry your brain with magnetic seizure therapy! Who knows, it may enhance your natural animal magnetism (Not!).
Recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, TV has been saturated with advertisements for psychiatric mental health care.
One of the most common is Robin Meade’s “Public Service Announcement” (PSA) hustling for NAMI.
The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) was founded in 1979. It has since changed its name to National Alliance on Mental Illness. The group has and continues to rely upon pharmaceutical funding—-more than $41 million since 1996.
NAMI’s campaign to “stop the stigma” and “end discrimination” against the mentally ill is really a pharmaceutical-funded front to sell harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs; the “Founding Sponsors” of the campaign were Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, SmithKline Beecham and Wyeth-Ayerst Labs.
You should know the chain of ownership that produced this NAMI PSA. Robin Meade is a news anchor at HLN TV, which is owned by CNN, which in turn is owned by WarnerMedia. The PSA was produced by WarnerMedia.
The whole purpose of this PSA, apparently, is to funnel people affected by the pandemic into the for-profit psychiatric mental health system.
While these are definitely uncertain times, NAMI and the mental health industry are taking advantage of people’s fears and creating a market for dangerous psychotropic drugs in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. One thing is certain — psychotropic drugs with their innumerable dangerous side effects are not the solution.
“THERE CAN BE NO KEENER REVELATION OF A SOCIETY’S SOUL THAN THE WAY IN WHICH IT TREATS ITS CHILDREN.” — NELSON MANDELA
The child mental health industry is a system that puts profit above children’s lives, preying on unsuspecting parents and taking advantage of disadvantaged children, such as those covered under Medicaid (state and federal health coverage for lower income families and those with disabilities). It is rife with abuse, yet this hugely profitable industry is rarely held to account for its rampant abuse of our most vulnerable—children.
It is an industry which milks the foster care system for huge profit, where children are four times more likely to be given mind-altering psychotropic drugs than non-foster care children, and much more likely to be prescribed cocktails of these drugs.
It is an industry that electroshocks children including babies, using state funds for lower income families (Medicaid).
It is a business masquerading as healthcare which sells parents and legislators on the idea of helping troubled children. Yet this help is more often simply incarcerating children in behavioral schools or psychiatric wards, where treatment consists of psychiatric drug cocktails, degradation, solitary confinement, and brutal restraint procedures which have killed children. And all of this is done under the guise of helping children.
THE ABUSE IS NOT LIMITED TO ONE CHAIN OF PSYCHIATRIC FACILITIES OR ONE MODE OF PSYCHIATRIC OR BEHAVIORAL “TREATMENT.” THE ABUSE, WHICH PROLIFERATES THE CHILD MENTAL HEALTH INDUSTRY, IS SYSTEMIC—YET UNKNOWN TO MOST OF THE PUBLIC.
For example: Information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveals that 19 states are currently administering electroshock to children, with 7 of those states electroshocking children aged 0-5 years old. These are all children being electroshocked while psychiatrists and facilities bill Medicaid for their “treatment.”
Yet another example—Only one month after the world witnessed the tragic death of George Floyd, unable to breathe as he was physically restrained and held to the ground, 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick, an African American, was physically restrained at Sequel Youth & Family Services’ facility in Michigan, and also cried out, “I can’t breathe!” before passing out. Thirty hours later, on May 1, 2020, he was dead. Cornelius had gone into cardiac arrest while being restrained by Lakeside Academy staff, a residential psychiatric facility that treated foster care and other kids with behavioral issues. A witness to Cornelius’s restraint said, “[T]his kid threw a sandwich. He was being unruly and they couldn’t control him. So, four guys…the size of rugby players tackled him.”
Cornelius is not alone; countless children have suffocated and died after being subjected to deadly restraints within these psychiatric facilities and behavioral treatment centers.
This is not healthcare. This is child abuse. And it is just the tip of the iceberg.
Therefore, please avail yourself of the information presented on our Fight For Kids website. Until enough people become aware of mental health industry abuse of children and teens, and arm themselves with the facts to protect not only their own children, but advocate for those who have no voice, it will continue. The profits will keep rolling in, parents will suffer and children will be abused.
